Composing the new Western: Calexico

NEW YORK CITY, New York — Joey Burns, the
guitarist and singer of the rock band Calexico, is sitting just a
few blocks from Ground Zero, looking across the water at the Statue
of Liberty. It is the Fourth of July. He assesses the situation
with rock ’n’ roll profundity: "It’s a trip, man
— we’re in New York City."

It is a trip,
because Burns and drummer John Convertino, Calexico’s core,
along with the band’s other four members, create music that
seems thoroughly rooted in the desert Southwest around Tucson,
Ariz., where they live.

Most regional Western music, like
pulp Western novels and movies, descends from the old myth of the
frontier. White cowboys sing during the lonesome stretches between
battles with outlaws and Indians. Modern country singers recycle
cookie-cutter small-town tales.

Burns continues
country-western’s storytelling tradition with lyrics that are
darker and more varied than the old clichés, but just as
evocative: illegal migrants dodging "across the wire"; other
Westerners living in "chain-store ghost towns";
maquiladora workers "sweating on the TV factory
line"; and strange tragedies such as car crashes, fires, or a
welder’s fall from a freeway overpass "like a burning star."

In spite of the tragedy in Burns’ lyrics, the
band’s music (many of their songs are instrumental) can be
uplifting, with touches of trumpet, soaring steel guitar and
mystical desert ambience. It’s not country-western, or
mariachi, or desert space-out rock, or Mexican
norteño music, but somehow all of these and
more. Calexico’s music, which includes four albums and
several shorter collections and side projects, forms part of a new
literature of the Southwest.

A mosaic of
influences

"Washed my face in the rivers of empire,"
Burns sings in "Sunken Waltz." "Made my bed from a cardboard crate
/ Down in the city of quartz."

There, in the first
seconds of Calexico’s most recent album, Feast of
Wire, Burns links two works of Western history (Donald
Worster’s Rivers of Empire and Mike
Davis’ study of Los Angeles urban planning, City of
Quartz) to the everyday lives of average Westerners.
Everyone’s tap water and real estate, the song suggests, come
to us through the grand myths that shape the region.

The
old tales of rough-hewn settlers making the desert bloom might
still inspire today’s motorized cowboys on ATVs or developers
in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson. But in the last few decades, the
frontier notion of "progress" has soured for many, and the Western
has lost its standing as a mainstream genre.

Many books
(and movies) have offered newer, more complicated portraits of the
Southwest. Burns cites Charles Bowden, Cormac McCarthy, Edward
Abbey and Carlos Fuentes, among other writers, as influences;
Calexico has recorded songs named after McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses and Fuentes’
The Crystal Frontier.

But
Calexico’s music does something that books can’t: It
forms a sort of grout that cements all the fractured tiles and
asphalt and broken glass into a coherent mosaic. A song can
seamlessly join a spaghetti Western’s Spanish guitar, a
norteño accordion, and a story about modern
suburban sprawl. Where the frontier story no longer rings true,
Calexico sparks hope that a region some see as hopelessly divided
can be united, at least in song.

The many styles of music
the band assimilates "kind of began filtering in just by being in
the proximity of this area," Burns says. But, he adds, Calexico is
careful to treat "all of these influences with a lot of respect,
without it being a cliché or making fun, but actually really
loving the tradition and where it comes from, and trying to find
out as much as we can."

Citizen
artists

After moving to Tucson from Los Angeles with the
band Giant Sand over a decade ago, Burns and Convertino founded
Calexico in 1996. The band has achieved modest commercial success,
climbing the college radio charts and performing internationally.
Touring around the world has given the musicians a broader sense of
political and cultural possibilities at home.

But Burns
doesn’t see the band’s music as directly political.
"You have to ask yourself how many times have you looked to song
lyrics or music as an influence for your political ideas," he says.
"I mean, if I want to find out about politics, I’m going to
read the newspaper."

Music’s role, he says, is "to
give feeling or give emotion to what’s going on around us day
to day, whether it’s personal, emotional, spiritual,
political, environmental, all those things."

Nevertheless, like many artists, Burns wonders about the band
members’ responsibilities as citizens: "Are we musicians or
artists or just everyday people?" He says Calexico lent a song to
The Nature Conservancy for a video on overgrazing, and expresses
regret over having licensed a song to Adidas for a shoe commercial,
in light of the company’s employment of sweatshop labor.

"From that experience, we learned more about what’s
going on with those companies," Burns says.

After the
Independence Day show in New York City, Calexico traveled to its
namesake town in California to perform there for the first time.
The concert was a benefit for an organization called Border Angels,
which places water and winter clothing stations in the deserts of
Southern California to save the lives of illegal immigrants. In
appreciation of both the band’s "own unique sound" and its
contribution to preventing "unnecessary deaths," Congressman Bob
Filner proclaimed July 9, 2004, "Calexico Day" in
California’s 51st Congressional District.

But Burns
believes that the landscape of the Southwest holds more hope than
either politics or rock ’n’ roll. In another song,
"Service and Repair," Calexico plays on both real estate’s
conception of "properties" and the New Age mysticism that
flourishes in the Southwest: "They say deep down inside, lie
properties of a healing kind, / If so it’d better come around
soon / … and offer up another chance / at sewing the dream
better suited for both soul and soil."